Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Notes -
Welp, so much for yesterday's stock market rally. The Nasdaq is off 4.5% today. Looks like it briefly hit 5.4% down. Officially in correction territory now, down more than 10% off the peak, and only up 6% YTD.
NVDA down 8%. Micron down 13%.
The steep dropoff means its likely a fund or two just got blown up. I guess people are digesting the data center votes.
Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and other states going blue can't help either. Where is stuff going to get built now? Not to mention that taxes are going to go up a lot in 2029, if not earlier.
I've made fun of gold bugs in the past, but I think they might have a point.
To be fair, the technology market and Nvidia and other hardware manufacturers in particular are in the middle of the AI boom (or bubble). Its valuation depends a lot on your expected trajectory. Will they keep their revenue for the next 50 years? Will they be the ones who will build the chips which will replace humans at every task? What solid angle of the light cone will their shareholders get for enabling the ascent of God-Emperor Altman?
For some companies, the valuation contains little epistemic uncertainty. Conditional on there still being a NYSE in a year, Coca Cola will still be traded there, and if it either increased its market cap by 10x or became worthless, that would be very surprising.
The companies in the AI boom are the opposite. At present, none of them have a business model half as sustainable as selling soft drinks to people (or GPUs to gamers, for that matter). People buying (or shorting) their stock are speculators, they believe that they can beat the market. For industries without ethical implication, I would say: if they succeed, good for them, if they fail, zero sympathy.
However, I do not consider AI to be an ethically neutral industry. If you believe in p(doom)>0, you need a damn good reason to consider the potential bankrolling of human extinction to be an ethically neutral investment. Such an argument can be made, for example with Antropic's somewhat galaxy-brained take "if we do not build ASI someone who cares less about alignment will build it instead". I admit I am on the fence if they are net positive or not, but still consider even the 20 Euros I fork over to them for Claude per month to be a moral hazard. I am sure that similar arguments could be made for other dubious investments. "Yes, we make our profit from selling small arms to paramilitary groups in a conflict region, but have you considered that the groups we sell to are significantly less likely to employ child soldiers or anti-personnel mines? The best way to stop the practice of child soldiers is to
pay mercenaries to kill themmake sure that groups which do not employ them win the conflict, so we are getting rich while making the world a better place."Anyhow, the point I was going to make was that an 8% dip of Nvidia is basically Tuesday. There are companies which are indicative of a large share of the economy. If GM crashes after an election, that would be a bit concerning because their market cap per employee is about 500k$, if they go tits up, that will be a lot of people out of a job. By contrast, the market cap per employee of Nvidia is about 100M$. If they have their lunch eaten by some other US chip manufacturer then nothing of value will be lost, their 42k employees are mostly highly paid engineers who will presumably be able to land on their feet.
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